Samsung Tocco SGH-F480 touchscreen phone

Who calls a phone Tocco, I mean really

Still, Samsung has included some 223MB of internal storage on this phone, plus Micro SD card expansion through an easy-access side-facing slot. Tracks can be synced with Windows Media Player on a PC using the supplied USB cable, or copied over using the in-box Samsung PC Studio software. Files can be dragged and dropped too with the phone in mass-storage mode, or sent over Bluetooth.

In addition to the music player, there’s an FM radio with RDS, and Samsung has added a Music recognition application, similar to Sony Ericsson’s TrackID, to help you identify songs you hear around you.

HSDPA, yes - but there's no Wi-Fi

Regulation mid-tier phone organiser tools are present and correct, including a calendar, memo and task functions, a calculator, unit convertor and voice recorder. Usefully, there’s an RSS reader, so users can get regular updates from their favourite websites and blogs quickly and easily. One game is pre-loaded: a not-that-enthralling picture puzzle.

We found the voice call performance of the Samsung Tocco up to standard, clear and consistent. We didn’t experience any problems with network drop-outs on our review sample, while signal strength held up acceptably. Real life power handling is going to depend on how you use the Tocco, whether you push the music player and other battery-sapping features, and how much that screen is active. Samsung reckons on getting up to three hours talktime or up to 250 hours of standby on 3G networks. We managed a steady two days-plus of average use without trouble.

Verdict

The Tocco improves on previous Samsung touchscreen mobiles, with a more responsive and improved user interface. The phone looks pretty fine too. One downside of such a compact, pocketable build, though, is the lack of screen space and consequently, finger room. The mid-tier feature line-up, headlined by the five-megapixel camera, is decent enough, and the widgets idea works neatly as a bonus feature, too. Although it has high-speed HSDPA mobile data connectivity, it’s a shame a slicker web browser isn't included.

Within these limits, it does a reasonably good job, with just a few fiddly exceptions.